120 applications, 8% callback
Six months. A hundred and twenty applications. Eight per cent of them led to a screening interview, and more than forty-five per cent got no response at all — not a rejection, not an automated acknowledgement.
His network, which had carried every previous search, produced exactly one referral that reached a hiring manager.
What makes this worth keeping is that he counted. Most accounts in this archive describe how a search felt; this one measures it — the callback rate, the proportion that got no answer at all, the single referral out of an entire professional network that produced a conversation.
The pattern inside the numbers is the part that should worry employers: the further he got, the worse the treatment. Applications were ignored, and the one company that interviewed him ghosted him afterwards. Engagement was punished, not rewarded.